Wednesday, September 2, 2009

[Jay could not wait for my rant, so he wrote his own. that is what is happening here.]

Hey, does the new comic seem weird to any of you? I can't quite put my finger on it.

Is it the font? No, that's not it...

The panels are gray? Still no...

Think one of you could help me out here?

Oh right, it's the fucking breasts and vagina. OK then.

Obviously the breasts are in panel one. I can tell from the comments that I'm not the only one perturbed by them. I am male and straight and generally OK with breasts, but I was not expecting them, and honestly, I don't enjoy having them staring at me over my morning coffee. And they're such detailed breasts, like - almost like they don't belong to a stick figure at all...

In panel two we have the vagina! Thanks Randall, by the way, for labeling it so we know what it is. We have seen vaginas in xkcd before, actually, but this one is larger and harder to ignore. I guess we do have that speech bubble covering it, but you know what, it still makes me uncomfortable.

Look, I feel - I feel like for some reason I have to justify my dislike for this comic, like it makes me some fucking prude who thinks ughvaginas tooindecentto show on the internet. I'm not. There's nothing wrong with nudity. If I'd seen this in Sexy Losers I wouldn't bat an eye. That's not my problem here. My problem is that this comic is drawn by Randall fucking Munroe, the guy who once drew this, and until recently this comic would have been very out of character for him. It's shocking because it's xkcd.

I guess I'm supposed to like, summarize this for you or something, but fuck it. You can see what's going on. And it's weird. It's really weird, and fuckeveryone who says it isn't. It's weird that when, for the first time in like 300 comics, Randall draws a non-stick figure, it's basically porn. It's weird that he spends enough time looking at nude photos on wikipedia to notice trends (I stole that one from the forums.) And is it just me or is the gray color he chose completely hideous? Like the breasts are dead. Dead breasts.

Aside from the obvious (the breasts and vagina - just making sure you hadn't forgotten them since I mentioned them one sentence ago), this comic sucks. It's not funny. It's not. This cheese is not burning me. It's not funny because it doesn't make sense. WHY THE FUCK are they doing this in a TGI Friday's? Are there customers there? Why not do it in their home? The whole situation is contrived. And speech doesn't show up in photos.

Ugh, what else.

My eyes keep returning to those fucking breasts.

Not sure why they bother me more than the vagina.

Oh yeah, there's Megan! Hello Megan! Again! I have already registered my thoughts on this subject, that Randall is fucking with us, because honestly c'mon. I know he avoids criticism but he must be aware of the jokes, right? I've seen them other places besides here. Rape Guy is going to have a field day with this over at xkcdcouldbebetter. Speaking of which, WAYS THIS COMIC COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER:

* He could have not drawn it.* He could have not uploaded it.* He could have drawn the first two panels as stick figures. It would have been funny because stick figures do not have genitals.* He could have made the guy's dialogue less awkward in the last panel. He wouldn't say the restaurant's name, he'd say "this is a family establishment." And then Randall could have drawn a TGI Friday's sign. Picture it in your head - don't you think this version would have been funnier? And more natural?

Whatever. I don't know what the fuck went through Randall's head. "Gosh, do I ever have a hankering to draw some external female genitalia! No one will mind! It's not like they'll be viewing this at work or anything!"

You're losing it, Randall.

And to the people on the forums who were like, "you shouldn't have been slacking off at work anyway!" - you can piss off. That's a petty argument and you know it. Most offices are OK with someone taking a short break to browse the internet to look at appropriate sites. For years xkcd has been appropriate. Today it is not. It's not unreasonable that some people would be pissed about that.

Yeah, that's pretty much all I got. Sorry for stealing your thunder, Carl. I know this isn't exactly angriest rants material, but this comic is so fucked up I'm sure there are still lots of angry things for you to say.

when i first saw this post i was like, AW CRAP someone figured out my password! but then i saw it was you. I'm still going to like, move it around a little so my post is on top and so that people know you wrote this one (people never seem to notice when someone else writes a post...)

It's not the breasts. It's not the vagina. It's not the forced dialogue. What it is, is

well

it's that the joke is that the quality of naked photos on Wikipedia are such that they could be taken at T.G.I. Fridays.

1) Why would you take naked photos at T.G.I. Fridays ever?2) Why would you then post them online after having been caught?3) Did he specifically choose T.G.I. Fridays over other establishments? Did he have a plan to go into public SPECIFICALLY to take photos of Megan naked?4) Did she leave her clothes on the table or did she just go into public completely nude?5) Is she on the table as he's taking the photo completely nude? No one ever asked "hey, this girl is taking her clothes off, that's completely rude or whatever old people say" at a T.G.I. Fridays?

This isn't a free speech issue. It's an insightful new look into Randall's mind.

do you guys think that maybe he hates tgi fridays or something, like that is where he went on his first date with megan, and now he is going to ruin their name amongst the nerd-dom of the Internet by associating them with this weird shit

I still think the joke would've made more sense if it was being filmed in some seedy stickman porn-studio or something. The barely-sober, unshaven cameraman (just give him a little bottle and a spotty face Randall, you can do it) muttering creepy things like "oh yeah baby" and "show me what daddy likes", before toddling off to his little stick-pc and uploading the photos to Wikipedia as anatomical references.Oh no wait I forgot this isn't a comic, it's "hey guys look at this thing I doodled in math class with minimum effort hurr". Silly me!

He never even mentions Wikipedia in the goddamn comic. When your alt-text is your punchline then you've failed incredibly hard at writing comics.

Wow, it's an actually hillarious comic this time and now you're gay? It's for fun, it's not disturbing! What are you? 13? A girl? Maybe you don't even know an actual boob, that must be it. The joke, by the way, was pretty good.

Rob, it's not even that he called "You've never seen a boob", he said "Maybe you don't even know an actual boob". Which, I have to admit, is true. I've seen and handled my fair share of them, but not once did I actually sit down to get to know any of them. I never tried to find out what the boob did for a living, or what its hobbies are, or how it imagines a perfect vacation. Their owners, sure, but not the mammaries themselves. Unfortunately, Anon 9:12 got me there.

And to the people on the forums who were like, "you shouldn't have been slacking off at work anyway!" - you can piss off. That's a petty argument and you know it. Most offices are OK with someone taking a short break to browse the internet to look at appropriate sites. For years xkcd has been appropriate. Today it is not. It's not unreasonable that some people would be pissed about that.

Even with the "science fair project" comic where there was a tiny vjj, it was at least small and unlikely that anyone passing by would notice it. With this, it's a HUGE GIANT BOOB and HUGE CROTCH SHOT filling up almost your entire screen. People are going to notice.

And anyone who doesn't take a couple minutes out of their day to clear their mind must either be a robot, brain dead, or on opium. Even if you don't have Internet access I'm pretty sure you've stopped for 15 minutes to chat with a coworker, stare vacantly out the window, grab a snack, anything to give your brain a rest from work. I don't know ANYBODY who can focus constantly, uninterrupted, on their job for 8 continuous hours.

Aloria, I said pretty much the same thing at the xkcd forums, but they will defend any comic to the bitter end. Most defenders of the post say something like "it's just a boob, what, we can't say boob anymore?". To which I would point out, that a boob may have been OK, but the HUGE CROTCH SHOT is going wayyyy too far.

I posted a reply, along with a 'made better' strip on their forums, but since I'm nice I'll share :D

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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